14 Quotes by Steven Kosiak

Waiting till the end of the day means you don't have time to get people to react outside of the briefing, although so much of this has leaked. So I guess it does give them some advantage.

Given the critical importance to the war effort of winning the 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqi people, and the generally strong support among Iraqis for reconstruction-related assistance, such a lopsided approach seems, at best, risky.

I think the incentives there are pretty strong to use the supplemental. It doesn't play the same way when you call it emergency funding.

The Army may have a tough time pushing these projected reductions through Congress.

We're long past the point where you can just look at the DoD budget. Now we're dipping so much into war-related funding.

There is some reason to be surprised that it's this much. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated the defense department would need $85bn and that was with no drawdown in troops.

At the beginning of the year, there's a lot of talk about spending restraint and reducing the deficit. At the end of the year, that's all kind of forgotten.

Currently we're paying for this war essentially on our credit card. We're not raising taxes, we're not cutting other programs to pay for it and that adds to the federal debt.

Even assuming, perhaps optimistically, that this gap could be covered by drawing equally upon U.S., international and Iraqi resources, this suggests that an additional $5 to $10 billion in U.S. reconstruction assistance might need to be provided.